Mr. Shaun Flanagan:

I acknowledge that. We have an emergency process. If we can establish that somebody definitively needs a medical card to access services but is not in a position to deal with the means testing part of it at the time, he or she can apply for an emergency medical card. We will give him or her a medical card. Decision making is medically driven. When our medical officers provide a recommendation for an emergency medical card, the individual gets a medical card. It is only for six months in that scenario. We start the means test three months later but if someone needs a medical card to access a service urgently, we have a process around that.

We also have medical cards for end-of-life situations. The Minister introduced a medical card for people with a terminal diagnosis and a prognosis of two years. Again, this can be a difficult discussion for a clinician to have with a patient because sometimes those discussions are iterative. With the way treatments and therapies have gone recently, it can be very challenging to establish a prognosis but we are trying to be as sensitive as we can regarding those things. I recognise that it is a challenging process.